1. 7. Looking back on your preliminary task,
what do you feel you have learnt in the
progression from it to the full product?
2. • Our planning as a group was far more effective in our main task than the preliminary task. The
preliminary task was shot at school one afternoon without much planning thought into it. There was
no shooting schedule and the script was a rough sketch, which we changed when we were filming
the scene itself.
• In our main task, we created a Whatsapp group chat to discuss what dates we could all film on,
where to film, what to wear, what to bring with us (for example I asked if I needed to bring wellington
boots as there is a shot where the character is jumping over water onto another bank. In this shot I
am wearing my wellington boots to stand in the water and get a side on angle of the character
jumping over the water. Without the confirmation of what to bring, we would not have got as a much
successful filming done as we did. )
3. • In our preliminary task, we didn't’t audition the actors, we just knew 2 a level drama students who
we thought would be a good pair to work together and got them to come down after school and
they agreed. Whereas in the main task, we interviewed actors to see what part they would play
then got back to them discussing whether they got the part or not. For example, Jack Bolton
auditioned, however the part of the two main characters was given to Fred and Greg instead. This
was to make sure we had the most talented actors possible to make our thriller the best it could be
.
• We improved the footage quality in our main task drastically. In our preliminary task, we used
hand-held cameras with only a few different angles and positions, whereas in our main task we
used a tripod, a great quality camera as well as trying out lots of different angles and positions in
order to get the right shot. The filming was much more precise and we took a lot of film until we
were happy with the finished product. I would say that the space we had as well as the time,
planning and products we used, allowed us to get much better footage than we had in the
preliminary task.
4. • The preliminary task, for us, was much more of a learning experience as it helped us understand
the basics of what to do for our thriller opening and then we could go and expand and learn on
top of the basics that we were taught.
• The preliminary task was edited on iMovie, compared to the main task which we edited on Final
Cut Pro. Editing makes a huge difference and the quality of editing tools in Final Cut Pro was
much better there were a lot more tools available compared to iMovie. The editing was much
tighter and we tried to limit the background sound as much as we could compared to in the
preliminary task, where the background noise was, in some cases, louder than the actual voices
speaking.
• Music and sound effects were also added in, as well as transitions and image effects. This made
a huge difference as it made it look like a proper film, for example the ‘Wadwaiteherd Films’ at
the start of the thriller was created and edited to make the film as life-like as possible.
• We had more thought into the props and costumes in the main task compared to in our
preliminary task. The costumes we chose were well equiped to the characters and who they
represented and we also were very lucky to manage to get the props that we had! The car is an
antique that Fred’s dad collects and was a perfect prop to use for the car scene at the end. The
‘sniper’ we used was Fred’s dads riffle and it made the scene look ten times better by using a
real gun. That acctually looks like a sniper.
